But the unease and ambivalence that many (including, but not only, non-Bengalis) in the poetry community here in India voice when yet another outsider tells them that Tagore is her/his favourite Indian poet – indeed the only Indian poet of that era that they have ever heard of – is not so much about his politics (he criticised the Indian nationalists in the decades before independence, but this seems to have as much to do with his discomfort with nationalism in general) and more to do with the kind of poetry he has come to represent India through.

So it begs the question (and this relates directly to Alicia Stallings’ recent post about Greek poets) – why, if Tagore is already at the very heart of institutional poetry in Bengal, too deeply embedded to be forgotten, does he need to be better known in the English language?

And in the Joan Miró garden near the Porte d'Italie in the 13th Arrondissement in the south of Paris, off a street called Tagore, there is another surprise: lost in a corner is a bronze bust of the poet and painter himself, pensive as he writes in a notebook.